Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Seven's problems are other nets fantasies - Tuesday 28 October 2008

Last night was a very low rating night – unless you were channel seven that is with Packed to the Rafters and All Saints boosting their numbers from last week.

The biggest drop was to The Simpsons which lost 125,000 viewers week on week whereas it’s stablemate Kenny’s World actually got a lift as did The Chopping Block, however with both shows staying under 900,000 I doubt either will earn a second season.

8.30 seems to be a major switch on point and it’s a fair assumption to note that there a lot of people who on average now are only watching one hour of TV per night – that has probably always been the case to some extend but the proportion of folks who only stay for the 8.30 hour is growing.

At 7pm the 3 commercial nets attracted 3,084,000 people to the box, at 8.00 that number grew to 3,549,000. For the 8.30 hour it pumps up again to 4,133,000 essentially adding 500,000 people per hour, then an 9.30 a million people take off leaving only 3,163,000 holding a remote which is tuned to 7, 9 or 10. It’s a good bet that not all of these people are heading to bed – a good proportion would be headed to cable, with a lot more firing up the internet, even DVDs and Video Games would get a look in – the choice is endless. In the future 9.30 programs pulling over 1 million are going to get a lot rarer.

What about the retention from 8.30 to 9.30 – well unsurprisingly Nine fared the best but only because they had the least to lose with 20 to 01 retaining 91.3% of it’s lead-in, Rush retained 78.8% of it’s lead-in – you would think Ten would be aiming for at least 85% given the strong NCIS marquee and the fact that Rush is a similar show in content, but no amount of promotion seems to able to give it a lift – the show appears to have found it’s audience and is settled between 900,000 and 1 million. Ten needs to put in a concerted promotional push to get new viewers to sample the show because Rush is now decoupled from it’s lead in.

All Saint fared the worst in terms of retention with only 67% but it almost doesn’t matter because the show is streets ahead of it’s rivals – it does however present seven with a future dilemma – here they have a show, a steamroller in Packed to the Rafters which could be used to launch or boost anything on their schedule, yet if they move either it, or All Saints they risk killing the Golden Goose – of course, Nine or Ten would kill for a problem like that right now!